Costing over £200 million, the Walkie Talkie tower at 20 Fenchurch Street has been designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly and features an opinion-dividing top-heavy form.

Set to open in just under a year’s time, the 580 ft high landmark at 20 Fenchurch Street, City of London will also feature a large viewing deck and ‘sky gardens’.

Open to the public, these will be Europe’s highest roof garden and London’s highest public park.

The gardens will be created by the landscapers behind the award winning Olympic Park and will feature over 2000 sub-tropical plants, mainly made up of drought resistant Mediterranean and South African flowers, shrubs and ferns.

Stephen Richards, a partner at London based garden designers Gillespies told the Standard:

The gardens will be totally unique in London, the largest and most exciting of their kind. It will like being in an eyrie.

There will be a series of platforms where there will be seating so you will be able to immerse yourself in plants and colour while still being aware that you are very high up to get that sense of a floating garden.

When completed, the roof garden will cover almost a fifth of an acre, with soil up to a metre deep.

Rosemary, thyme and other herbs will be grown in the garden for the three hoity-toity restaurants due to open at the top of the block.

There will be a “sky garden” champagne bar on the 35th floor, with the Darwin Brasserie above and the wallet- crushing exclusive Fenchurch Seafood Bar and Grill on the 37th level.

Update – it’s won the Carbuncle Cup for the worst new building of the year.

The Guardian picks up the story:

It has singed shopfronts, melted cars and caused great gusts of wind to sweep pedestrians off their feet. Now the Walkie Talkie tower, the bulbous comedy villain of London’s skyline, has been bestowed with the Carbuncle Cup by Building Design (BD) magazine for the worst building of the year.

Responsible for a catalogue of catastrophes, it is hard to imagine a building causing more damage if it tried. It stands at 20 Fenchurch Street, way outside the city’s planned “cluster” of high-rise towers, on a site never intended for a tall building. It looms thuggishly over its low-rise neighbours like a broad-shouldered banker in a cheap pinstriped suit. And it gets fatter as it rises, to make bigger floors at the more lucrative upper levels, forming a literal diagram of greed.